That Which Is ~ Cantos I-V

That Which Is ~ Cantos VI-X

That Which Is ~ Artist's Statement

That Which Is : Marcia Lippman

“I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. "    Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

That Which Is, is an installation combining my photographs with found photographs I’ve collected over some 25 years. All the images, both mine and found, spoke mysteriously to some stilled memories within me. Some inner sanctum was opened, confirmed, affirmed by the texture of a marble statue, the melancholy of a deep forest, the seductive glance from a Victorian cabinet card. These are the things which penetrated me, marked me, and thus are all fragments of the archeology of my past and my perceptual process, which, now merged, have been reframed into something entirely new.

The narrative of their union veers between fact and imagination in visual poems which I call Cantos. The Cantos, which are specific combinations of images, either alone or groups of three, both mine and found, are themselves vignettes, snapshots which converse with my past. Memories, especially childhood memories, shape our inner world. They are the stories we tell to others as well as to ourselves in order to make sense of our lives. They give resonance to what is unknown and unspoken, and perhaps even what never really happened, but has become that which is. Writers like Faulkner and Pinter, Barthes and Bachelard have all echoed Proust’s thoughts that the remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were. Oliver Sacks recently added that ‘ We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.’  These Cantos are an act of recollection. They speak to the subjective and ephemeral nature of memory and reflect on the immediacy of our past in our lives; the longing, the family secrets, the textures and stains, the loss, the absence, the love, the beauty, the fears and the dreams, all pulled forward by something in the present, by a physical object, by a photograph, which sends each of us back to our own past. Memory and photography share an alchemic relationship. That which was becomes that which is, and, in turn,that which will be.

I am a storyteller by nature. I tell stories with words and with images. Time and Memory have been the recurring stories in my photographic work for decades, long before I merged these two bodies of images and realized how, together, they emerged as a fully realized visual memoir. As Rilke discerningly observed, ‘Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.’ 

That Which Is ~ Press Release

That Which Is: Marcia Lippman  Opens Saturday, June 1, 2013

Washington, Ct. May 17, 2013- Photography dealer Kathy McCarver Root and her gallery, KMR Arts, proudly announce the opening of its latest show of fine art photography, “That Which Is: Marcia Lippman.” The exhibition will open June 1 with a reception with the artist from 2-5pm and will continue through July 20, 2013.

On June 1, 2013, KMR Arts will open an exhibition of new work by Marcia Lippman. Entitled That Which Is, this work represents an entirely new direction for the artist, yet it also connects deeply as a continuum of Lippman’s quest for beauty in the world and within life itself. The exhibit consists of Lippman’s exquisite gelatin silver prints combined with found photographs collected during decades of travels. The various vernacular vintage photographs are in the form of portraits, snapshots, hand colored photographs, cabinet cards, tintypes, and salt prints. Both Lippman’s prints and the found photographs are presented in groups that the artist has dubbed Cantos. These Cantos serve as visual poems or memoirs. At the heart of this exhibition is the idea that memory and photography share an alchemical relationship: photographs lead to and are closely connected to memory. The show addresses the ephemeral nature of memory, desire, secrets, truth, fiction, textures, time. The combination of Lippman’s own photographs with these found photographs results in a recontextualizing of both into something altogether new. The exhibition and the images in it invite the viewer to make his or her own narrative as inspired by the images in the Cantos.

Kathy McCarver Root says, “It has been exciting to witness the development of this body of Marcia’s work. These Cantos connect to the innermost human desire to create a personal narrative through images. This exhibition will ultimately have the feeling of an installation, a complete vision from an artist comprised of over 100 pieces. This work engages with a movement within the world of contemporary art; artists like Tacita Dean, Lorna Simpson, Duane Michals, and Dan Estabrook are incorporating found anonymous photographs into their work and giving them an entirely new context while undermining our traditional view that historical photographs are objective documents.”

  

Marcia Lippman has spent much of her life traveling the globe (Burma, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, India, England, France, Argentina, Italy, Czechoslovakia among others) to destinations that possess a deep sense of memory, of history, and of mystery. Her soulful, evocative, and meditative photographs resulted in a monograph entitled Sacred Encounters, (Edition Stemmle, 2000).  A second monograph, West Point, (Stemmle, 2001), with an introduction by James Salter, comprised of photographs created during a year in residence at West Point and was published on the anniversary of West Point’s bicentennial.  Lippman is a recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) grants and has been an influential teacher at Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts for many years.

some new work...

Lecture at The Center For Alternative Photography 10/18/11

Mi Buenos Aires Obscuro

Lyle Rexer on Marcia Lippman's work.

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Artists create their own precursors. Every work brings a history into being, a new path through the forest of the past. Borges tells us this in his essay on Kafka. But every work also creates its own geography, new maps that draw continents where there had been only islands. In Buenos Aires, you cannot place where you are. Is it New York, with its winter grayness and decaying infrastructure, its shedding plane trees? Certainly not an imperial capital like Madrid or a colonial capital like Mexico City. The absence of minorities is too glaring, the modernity too extensive, confirmed in the very fabric of its vast street grid. Horacio Coppola’s photograph of Corrientes Avenue at night, from the air, circa 1939, lit up like the Great White Way, conveys the flavor, the placeless self-confidence of a city without a past. Or maybe the opening shot of the miniseries Epitafios, a long overhead of moving traffic in Anywhereopolis, identifiable only by the fact that everyone in the show drinks Malbec.

When Marcia Lippman arrived in Buenos Aires, she wasn’t sure where she was, except in a place that looked familiar but was utterly strange. It is so much easier to take pictures in a place that is strange. You are relieved of the burden of knowing anything, of having to distinguish between the obvious and the intimate. There is an openness in which you discover yourself and where you imaginatively are. That sense of discovery is all over these pictures. She gave up her aestheticizing distance and opened herself to emanations, to pathos.

The pictures are details of something larger but never imaged, snatches of light in a foreign tomb. That’s the terrible secret of Buenos Aires, that it looks so modern but it is a city of the dead. Its famous cemeteries – Recoleta and Chacarita, are labyrinths, and Lippman, born a Catholic, raised a Jew, wandered there, looking for arrested time, broken sepulchers: a candelabra, like the ones often stolen from those very sepulchers, just as flowers are, for sale; a lace curtain, like those sold along with the piles of family silver in the flea market in San Telmo. A mortgaged past, mortgaged for a future that almost happened.

She did not go to La Tablada, the vast Jewish cemetery on the far outskirts for, above all, this was a Catholic journey. She had discovered her Catholic roots very late, because they were so deeply buried and denied. One of her pictures is a cross on a wall, divided between black and white, light and dark. This is the other secret of Buenos Aires: its primitive sanctity, its aura of devotion and violation. Broken sidewalks, broken tombs. Dog shit and dulce de leche.

The city was exposed to the visitor, and she exposed herself to it. She found that the city did not end when and where she left it, that it has the strange power to impose a geography that does not appear on any map. Sometime later Lippman was in Italy, and she found herself pursuing once again a visual itinerary of fragments, in a museum of shadows and frozen gestures. Roughly thirty-five percent of the population of Buenos Aires is descended from Italian immigrants, and the photographer had traveled the path of return, a reverse diaspora. She carried with her the strange tango-flower of Catholic longing, so apparently alien to the new Italy, and planted it there, in the soil of a bright northern Italy where shadows are bad memories, the southern affliction. But how did all those elaborate buildings get built and those overripe paintings get painted, if not out of the spirit that she discovered in Buenos Aires? And was not Leonardo’s great artistic innovation the sfumato, the revelation that it is not line and light that create volume but shadow? There is holiness even for the nonbeliever, especially for her, in Buenos Aires, capital of a new trans-oceanic nation named Caravaggio.

“There is an hour that makes the dusk your escort,” wrote the poet Paul Celan, thinking of a world like Lippman’s in which it is always twilight. The photographer used her last rolls of infra-red film for these pictures, and it feels almost sacramental, like the offering of some precious metal in hope of transubstantiation, a miracle. It is wholly appropriate that the properties of this film should never have been displayed so evocatively in her photographs until these final sequences, where subject and sensibility have united. Shadows are smoke. Light is liquid. The film itself passes out of its blank potential, passes away into its exposed and fixed form, into apparitional images. And the photographs seem not so much to record the world but to retrieve it from an encroaching dark, coax its last brilliance from a fading world.

Along with her film, the photographer herself passed out of one state and into another. That is what we see above all. Celan’s poem is about leavetaking, and Lippman in her arrival on a new continent is also taking leave. Or perhaps looking back, looking again. The paintings that appear so often in these photographs are not appropriations but reflections. The feet, hands and above all female breasts that the artist isolates form an inventory of self-examination. That is why the whole picture is not necessary, only those elements that the eye seeks and the heart needs. These beautiful fragments acknowledge the impulses behind devotion: desire and diminution, a sense of timelessness and the sense of an ending. They remind us that twilight, although it is always nearer than we think, allows us enough light to witness the body’s radiance.

-Lyle Rexer

Brooklyn, New York